Pollinate Trading

Decided to go live on YouTube this morning for about an hour, covering markets and a bunch of the research we are doing in the mentor program. 

Here's the link to the LIvestream https://youtu.be/sr7eifUntow

When I decided to do the Trading Thunderdome in July I knew we had a huge demand for traders that were looking forward to joining. I was surprised to find out that there were so many traders who were ready to pay the steep fee to join, but weren't ready to go yet. That is, they still had a lot of work to do to benefit and contribute before being able to join the Thunderdome.  

Rather than take their money and run them through it anyway. I started thinking of how I could help more people get to a place in their trading that they would be in a position to benefit from the Thunderdome.  

To all who signed up and paid for the Thunderdome, my apologies, we will be postponing the Thunderdome. I will be giving you a refund.  

Now we need to focus on making traders better, before the Thunderdome. I have some ways that I am looking at making that happen, in a way that is affordable and effective.  

Stay tuned...  

Ok on to markets....

Today I'm going to go over what I'm looking at as we approach earnings season, with the Nasdaq at all time super-hyper-mega highs, CoVid19 cases spiking, heat waves across the US and The UFC dominating sports!

I will be doing a livestream for the members of the Trading Lab only going over everything in this email along with my process and we'll be looking at possible outcomes. We'll be digging in to the individual sectors to identify different stocks for our watch list heading in to earnings. 

You can join us by signing up for the Pollinate Trading Lab

We have a great group in there now, backtesting, building systems and calling out live trades. The amount of knowledge skill AND teamwork that is happening in there is my favorite part. Join us!

Though I don't spend a lot of time trading individual equities, earnings season is upon us. My approach to markets are to focus on quantitative strategies, and sprinkle a little discretionary on top of it according to the...

I've been getting hit up by a bunch of people about this breakout in metals. 

To be clear, we are in a bull quiet market in metals

Gold has been doing quite well since it cooled off from it's move into Bull Volatile last fall (US time), shown by the blue histogram. Recall that this is a requirement for a major top, it doesn't mean it is a major top, but you don't have a major top without one. 

And when I get asked if I think this is the top and how could I even consider getting long at such high levels, I usually respond with "I can see the future" or something like that. But really it's just that there is no Bull Volatile regime in place yet, so sitting long is easy.

Then we get the next question...

"OMG Silver is up 20% in about a week, this is a blow off top!"

To me, it seems we just flipped into Bull Quiet on a breakout. So though we might not go a lot higher from here we just entered Bull Quiet and we'd need a Bull Volatile regime to show up before we topped,...

As we approach the end of the month and the monthly candle close, I like to review the market regimes that we currently find ourselves in across the different asset classes. 

This is something I do every week so that I have a "tone" for where we've been and what to be paying attention to going forward. 

When I have a market regime figured out for that particular market then I can determine if any of my strategies have good enough edge to trade, or simply stay away. 

If you find this valuable to your trading please do forward this email on or share it with others. The more people we can help from taking the wrong type of positions in the wrong market regimes, maybe we can save some friends a lot of money and heartache. 

If you got forwarded this email and want more, do sign up for FREE here.

On to the regimes!

• Symbol: EURUSD
• Volatility: Low to rising
• Direction: Bullish
• Bull quiet market regime on rising volatility with a price breakout above the 2019/2020...

We are a bit over two weeks since we launched the real time trade alerts for members of the Trading Lab and performance is outstanding. 

At the time of this writing on August 3rd after the New York close, we are up over 34%. For context we started the live tracking July 15th, and Bitcoin hasn't really contributed at all in the returns, in case you were wondering. 

In addition to the calls that we are officially pushing out, and more importantly the members are improving on their own systems so that they are taking really good trades themselves, and helping one another.

These are all trades called out real time in the Slack group. 

But I also want to recognize we have a number of great traders in there who are all at different stages of their trading careers. Some are just getting started in the right direction after a few years of chasing hair brained ideas that some marketing guru convinced them was the secret to all the Ferrari's you can handle. Or some...

Last week we discussed how we have moved (generally) into a bull volatile market regime in equities indices, metals, and a number of the S&P 500 sectors.

Rather quickly there after we experienced the volatility that the bull volatile regime is known for. 

To review, here are the most notable characteristics of the bull volatile regime

Bull Volatile

• This is a requirement for a long term market top (but doesn't indicate a major top). Major market tops don't happen outside a Bull Volatile regime!
• If I've been riding a long term uptrend I look to take profits in this regime or lighten my exposure
• If I'm trading more tactically I'm trading FVBO and lighter position sizes, usually max 1% risk
• Price is highly volatile up here, moves up and down are bigger
• Fear and greed is on full force!

To no ones surprise who subscribes to these emails or follows our work at Pollinate, the market reacted appropriately. We moved...

It has been a busy week (and weekend) with the cryptocurrency markets taking a lot of our focus. In fact this week our busiest channel in the Lab is the Crypto channel, by far.

I won't make this email all about crypto but I want showcase some of the trades we took this past week. 

(I go a lot deeper on market regimes down below, stay with me!)

OMGUSD

EOSUSD

ALGOUSD

To be fair, it was pretty easy to make good money in the crypto space last week. But there were a number of members in the lab who didn't know how to access the markets, didn't understand security, didn't know what assets to trade and generally would've been lost without a network of fellow traders to lean on. 

You'll notice that you don't see any SQN indicator or ATR indicators on these charts, you might say "But Chris, you are the regime guy, how do you trade without the regimes?"

It's very comforting to rely on indicators to do your dirty work, and they do a great job on the whole. But if...

A quick reminder about the Trading Lab before we get started. If you find trading to be an isolating place, then you aren't alone. I've been trading for over 20 years and I know for sure that the times when I haven't had a team to work with, to bounce ideas off of, to mentor and be mentored, have been my worst periods of trading.

This is why I created the Trading Lab. Having a team of fellow traders at hedge funds, family offices, prop traders and professional traders to ask questions, get real insight on what they are seeing on their trading desk. I can ask an equity trader at a hedge fund what he's seeing in sector flows. I can check in with the prop traders on what they are seeing in FX. And of course EVERYONE has a question about something in Crypto. 

We will be increasing prices at the end of the month, so if you are on the fence you should join now and lock in the current price for as long as you maintain the subscription. Join us in the Trading...

It’s Fed Day today, otherwise known as the day that all the crankiest, smuggest of all participants are screaming over each other to claim the end of the world, with an accompanying chart that has a trend-line that was broken or chart of the recent selloff of the DXY, with no further context.

What follows are hoards of Middle Skill traders rushing to their TD Ameritrade accounts to buy MORE puts on SPY, TSLA and some complex option structure on Eurodollar Futures (not EURUSD).

Who know’s, this time they may finally be right!

Rather than get everybody all worked up about the Dollar collapse, China, Covid19, the US Presidential Election, and a thousand other obviously priced in events let’s have a look at where we are historically in all the currencies. 

Here's the $DXY monthly chart

The first thing I notice is that we are pretty much at normal historical levels today, perhaps even up to the top end of those normal levels. The two big spikes way...